TSA won't make airport security report deadline — due the day of Brussels bombings

The same day bomb blasts in an unsecured part of Brussels' airport and transit system left dozens dead, the administration was set to miss a deadline mandating that the TSA answer whether U.S. airports are equipped to respond to a similar attack.

Last fall, Congress enacted a law ordering that TSA must ensure that individual airports with a TSA presence have a plan in place to handle security incidents, including active shooters and terrorist attacks. The law was in response to a TSA officer who was gunned down at Los Angeles International Airport in 2013.

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A report on those plans was due in lawmakers' hands Tuesday, the same day as the Brussels horror — a deadline TSA will not make.

TSA refused to give any details to POLITICO about when the report will be submitted, but staffers for House lawmakers on both sides of the aisle said Tuesday they haven’t heard from TSA on the issue.

In Brussels, terrorists set off bombs in a public area of the Zaventem airport, killing at least 11 people and wounding more than 100 others, exactly the kind of "soft target" scenario at an airport that Congress ordered TSA to study.

The law that ordered the study, named after slain TSA officer Gerardo Hernandez, requires the security agency to verify that airports have a plan in place to deal with terrorist attacks that occur anywhere within the airport perimeter, including non-secure areas such as where passengers check in, say goodbye to loved ones and check departure and arrival times.

But some lawmakers think a top-to-bottom TSA examination isn't enough. Sen. Chuck Schumer vowed Tuesday that Democrats would push legislation to tighten security at airport perimeters — and to provide ample funding to do so — as part of a long-term reauthorization bill for the FAA.

"We're going to learn more about what happened in the coming days," Schumer said. "When we do, it's going to be critically important that we look again at the safety and security of our transit systems to ensure this type of attack doesn't occur on American soil."

Some lawmakers acknowledged that tackling the security concerns of public spaces around and inside airports is much more difficult in practice.

“It’s a very hard issue to determine,” said Rep. Peter DeFazio, the top Democrat on the House Transportation Committee. “I mean, how are you going to provide perimeter security — perimeter around the airport, you know, the secure area? Sure."

"Perimeter in terms of, we’re going to stop every car a mile from the airport and keep the cars spaced more than a hundred feet apart when we stop them so that if one has a bomb in it, it won’t kill other people? I just don’t think that’s going to happen," he said.

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul acknowledged the challenges of preventing a terrorist attack on an airport’s outer edges, mentioning that he visited Belgium last May and “you see military everywhere.”

He said he believes the most significant terrorist threats facing the United States today aren’t planned to take place on airplanes, but instead to strike nonsecure public spaces.

“Our big concerns are an active shooter, foreign fighter, or a suicide bomb threat — that’s what we saw in Paris, and that’s what we saw in Belgium today,” McCaul said.

McCaul also praised changes to the visa waiver program made last December and called for lawmakers to support efforts to shore up security requirements for international flights entering the United States.

“It’s not so much flights in the United States; it’s the last points of departure from Europe and other countries coming in. That’s where the real threat lies, and that’s where we need to be putting our focus,” McCaul said.

The House Homeland Security Committee will vote on a slew of bills Wednesday, including one proposal dealing with point of departure airports. But even if Congress continues to churn out bills aimed at preventing terrorist attacks, lawmakers acknowledge it’s nearly impossible to address every issue.

Airport lobbies, for instance, “are very difficult and potentially soft targets,” DeFazio said, adding that other large venues where people congregate — such as shopping malls and sports complexes — are as well.

“I think we’re going to have to rely a lot more on intelligence in preventing the attacks, than being able to predict every soft target in America, which is not practical,” he said.